If you live in the same online bubble as me, you must have heard about the xz/liblzma backdoor, and if you haven't you can read a TL;DR here.
In its wake, a lot of folks are discussing critical open source infrastructure, sustainability, expectations that can or can not be placed on hobbyist maintainers, and whether they need to payed for their contribution. People point out various foundations that have employed high-profile maintainers so that they could work on the project full-time, and others reasonably assert that such approach can't scale to cover all of the open source.
So, here's my hot take: they only way to sustainably develop free software is to not need to be payed for it. And the only way this could be achieved at a scale software industry needs is for people not to need a paid job to have a decent, comfortable and safe living. Not just for open source maintainers, every human being on this planet. Don't want to work? That's okay, enjoy days with your family and friends. Getting bored? That's cool, do something that's interesting to you, and if your work is beneficial to the society at large - enjoy our heartfelt thank yous.
If you ask me "but who would want to work as a trash truck driver then?", my answer is "go check out how many people play Farming Simulator and similar games". Damn, I myself spent days driving virtual trucks in Euro Truck Simulator, for negative amount of money - I had to pay for the game after all. Then there's also AI, which wouldn't really mind the stink of trash cans that need to be taken out.
And while what I'm saying may sound outlandish or communist, it's actually neither. The objective is to overcome material scarcity, and historically the need for human labor has been the main obstacle for that. I firmly believe that today's technological advancement level is sufficient to achieve that at least as far as physical goods go. It'll take much longer to get to the stage where all services can be comfortably provided on volunteer basis, but it no longer seems implausible to me. We don't even have to abandon capitalism (something I have mixed feelings about, but that's a rant for another day), it'll just shift into the realm of non-material or unique goods.
windows
windows
I didn't realize Windows now supports Bonjour by default, this is nice. I ought to begin using it more actively then.
Time to see what the hype was all about?..
Two beliefs I hold very strongly:
- It's okay to ask any question, even a controversial one.
- It's not okay to ask a question if you are not prepared to even consider an answer that doesn't match your own. You don't have to agree, but you must at least consider it.
Everyone said get a Brother printer so I bought a 3-in-1 scanner and printer. There seems to be something wrong with it though. I plugged it into a Linux laptop, opened a document, pressed print, selected the printer, and it printed. Then I opened simple-scan, pressed scan, and it scanned.
This isn't how printers and scanners are supposed to work. Where do I install the drivers that don't work properly etc? This was no fun. I demand a refund.
AI opportunity truly beneficial for humanity: automatically navigate through the cookie consent dialogs and reject all non-essential. Pleeeeease.
There are two kinds of companies. Some hire people to solve problems. Others hire people to execute orders.
I found a perfect lazy-ass solution for the tea supply continuity problem.
It involves a larger thermos and an insulated cup (this one is nice because it keeps tea temperature consistent longer, but any insulated cup will do really).
The algorithm is as follows:
- Wake up.
- Boil a kettle. Optionally let it cool down a bit (80Β°C is fine for me, talk to your lawyer to find out if it's good for you).
- Brew up a fuckload of tea at once, fill up the whole thermos, and the cup as well.
- Get them over to your ~cave~ desk.
- Congratulations, you have a day's worth supply of warm tea, just refill the cup when it runs out.
I feel like the funny thing for me with the Tiktok ban is that a lot of Americans, on either side of the debate, don't seem to realize that Tiktok feels to Americans like every single social media platform feels to people outside the US. You're telling me the app is located outside your country and your government's control, and you don't know how its data gets handled in that country? That's every app, to me.
Could somebody recommend a custom ROM for Fairphone 5?
https://e.foundation/e-os/ looks like Lineage with Nextcloud integration, which is pretty nice, since I have my own instance. But the rom seems quite buggy so far on fp5ΒΉ
https://iode.tech/ looks like Lineage with advanced ad blocking
https://calyxos.org/ looks like Lineage with relocked bootloader (not sure I prefer it to having root access π€) and a VPN service I don't really need. "Work profile" is an interesting feature, while pre-bundled Signal doesn't make much sense to me.
Is there anything I'm missing? Could you share your experience with any of these?
My main goal is to get more control over my device, less bloat and Google integrations. But I wouldn't like to have even more bugs compared to the official rom :)
Dear developers: Please stop using random valid domains in your examples or documentation, there are dedicated domain names and IP ranges for that.
For domain names for example use: example.com
Reference: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6761#section-6.5
For IP address ranges for example use: 203.0.113.0/24
or
2001:DB8::/32
Reference: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5737#section-3 [IPv4] or https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3849#section-4 [IPv6]
Thanks!
The infrastructure people.
If the web browser was invented today, Apple wouldn't let it on the app store
New episode!
Gleefully announcing new releases and projects from around the π GopherVerse & GopherJS interview with Grant Nelson
HTMZ is absurd and clever, I love it
It isn't a framework, there's nothing to include⦠HTMZ relies on an iFrame in your page that's used to stage content
When you click a link, the link is loaded inside the hidden iframe. When the iFrame calls it's `onLoad` handler, it inserts it's contents into the target element of your choosing
It's like pjax, but without the P or jax bits
I won't use it, but I love it. 3 points πββοΈ
That's just genius
Happy Caturday!
The racism behind chatGPT we are not talking about....
This year, I learned that students use chatGPT because they believe it helps them sound more respectable. And I learned that it absolutely does not work. A thread.
A few weeks ago, I was working on a paper with one of my RAs. I have permission from them to share this story. They had done the research and the draft. I was to come in and make minor edits, clarify the method, add some background literature, and we were to refine the discussion together.
The draft was incomprehensible. Whole paragraphs were vague, repetitive, and bewildering. It was like listening to a politician. I could not edit it. I had to rewrite nearly every section. We were on a tight deadline, and I was struggling to articulate what was wrong and how the student could fix it, so I sent them on to further sections while I cleaned up ... this.
As I edited, I had to keep my mind from wandering. I had written with this student before, and this was not normal. I usually did some light edits for phrasing, though sometimes with major restructuring.
I was worried about my student. They had been going through some complicated domestic issues. They were disabled. They'd had a prior head injury. They had done excellent on their prelims, which of course I couldn't edit for them. What was going on!?
We were co-writing the day before the deadline. I could tell they were struggling with how much I had to rewrite. I tried to be encouraging and remind them that this was their research project and they had done all of the interviews and analysis. And they were doing great.
In fact, the qualitative write-up they had done the night before was better, and I was back to just adjusting minor grammar and structure. I complimented their new work and noted it was different from the other parts of the draft that I had struggled to edit.
Quietly, they asked, "is it okay to use chatGPT to fix sentences to make you sound more white?"
"... is... is that what you did with the earlier draft?"
They had, a few sentences at a time, completely ruined their own work, and they couldnt tell, because they believed that the chatGPT output had to be better writing. Because it sounded smarter. It sounded fluent. It seemed fluent. But it was nonsense!
I nearly cried with relief. I told them I had been so worried. I was going to check in with them when we were done, because I could not figure out what was wrong. I showed them the clear differences between their raw drafting and their "corrected" draft.
I told them that I believed in them. They do great work. When I asked them why they felt they had to do that, they told me that another faculty member had told the class that they should use it to make their papers better, and that he and his RAs were doing it.
The student also told me that in therapy, their therapist had been misunderstanding them, blaming them, and denying that these misunderstandings were because of a language barrier.
They felt that they were so bad at communicating, because of their language, and their culture, and their head injury, that they would never be a good scholar. They thought they had to use chatGPT to make them sound like an American, or they would never get a job.
They also told me that when they used chatGPT to help them write emails, they got more responses, which helped them with research recruitment.
I've heard this from other students too. That faculty only respond to their emails when they use chatGPT. The great irony of my viral autistic email thread was always that had I actually used AI to write it, I would have sounded decidedly less robotic.
ChatGPT is probably pretty good at spitting out the meaningless pleasantries that people associate with respectability. But it's terrible at making coherent, complex, academic arguments!
Last semester, I gave my graduate students an assignment. They were to read some reports on labor exploitation and environmental impact of chatGPT and other language models. Then they were to write a reflection on why they have used chatGPT in the past, and how they might chose to use it in the future.
I told them I would not be policing their LLM use. But I wanted them to know things about it they were unlikely to know, and I warned them about the ways that using an LLM could cause them to submit inadequate work (incoherent methods and fake references, for example).
In their reflections, many international students reported that they used chatGPT to help them correct grammar, and to make their writing "more polished".
I was sad that so many students seemed to be relying on chatGPT to make them feel more confident in their writing, because I felt that the real problem was faculty attitudes toward multilingual scholars.
I have worked with a number of graduate international students who are told by other faculty that their writing is "bad", or are given bad grades for writing that is reflective of English as a second language, but still clearly demonstrates comprehension of the subject matter.
I believe that written communication is important. However, I also believe in focused feedback. As a professor of design, I am grading people's ability to demonstrate that they understand concepts and can apply them in design research and then communicate that process to me.
I do not require that communication to read like a first language student, when I am perfectly capable of understanding the intent. When I am confused about meaning, I suggest clarifying edits.
I can speak and write in one language with competence. How dare I punish international students for their bravery? Fixation on normative communication chronically suppresses their grades and their confidence. And, most importantly, it doesn't improve their language skills!
If I were teaching rhetoric and comp it might be different. But not THAT different. I'm a scholar of neurodivergent and Mad rhetorics. I can't in good conscience support Divergent rhetorics while supressing transnational rhetoric!
Anyway, if you want your students to stop using chatGPT then stop being racist and ableist when you grade.
#chatGPT #LLM #academic #graduateStudents #internationalStudents #ESL